FIFA: A Kernel-Level Fault Injection Framework for ARM-Based Embedded Linux System

Abstract

Emulating fault scenarios by injecting faults intentionally is commonly used to test and verify the robustness of a system. As the number of hardware devices integrated into an embedded system tends to increase consistently and the chance of hardware failure is expected to increase in an SoC, it becomes important to emulate fault scenarios caused by hardware-related errors. To this end, we present a kernel-level fault injection framework for ARM-based embedded Linux systems, called FIFA, aiming to investigate the effect of an individual hardware error in a real hardware platform rather than performing statistical analysis by random experiments. FIFA consists of two complementary fault injection techniques, one is based on the Kernel GNU Debugger and the other on hardware breakpoints. Compared with the previous work that emulates bit-flip errors only, FIFA supports other types of errors such as time delay and device failure. The viability of the proposed framework is proved by real-life experiments with an ODROID-XU4 system.